


The Girl from the Burnt Village

by Lilly_White



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Ghosts and Dream-Like Sequences, Grief, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, i don't know how it got there but apparently it suits them, there's some fae shit going on in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22756429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: Tifa’s first months in Midgar are full of ghosts. Well, one in particular.She tries to get on with her life but he doesn’t make it easy.[Written for the FFVII Rarepair Week 2020.]
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Barret Wallace, Tifa Lockhart/Sephiroth
Comments: 36
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

Feb. 16 | Day 1. **Weight of the World**

*

Loss, they call it. One syllable. Fire and carnage tucked into a tiny four-letter word. When Tifa sees it on condolence cards, she wonders what kind of mighty spell it must’ve taken to fit all of that into such small lines of ink. 

_Sorry for your loss_. 

There are only very few people alive who know what it is to lose what she has lost. They are the ones she traveled with to Midgar, after that fateful night. She still meets them sometimes for drinks at the slum’s cleaner pubs. But after a time, the comfort of empathy turns stale. It’s like they are all standing around a gaping hole in the ground, pointing at it and saying, “Look. There’s a hole in the ground.” And while it was good at first to be with people who see it, rather than the rushing crowds who brush past her without sparing a glance for it - it fills her with a sort of restlessness, to know that none of them can ever bridge it. Or effectively do anything to fill it.

It’s there. It will always be there. Creatures crawl out of it at night, strangle her in her sleep, skirt on the edges of her vision during the day. When she gets her first job at the Seventh Heaven as a waitress, she tries to keep them at bay. But the shadows pull martini glasses from her fingers; cackle at her from under the tables; choke her with fear whenever the cooks burn something and send smoke billowing into the air. 

The smell of smoke haunts her. It clings to her. It never goes away. When it grows too strong, the scar on her chest begins to ache. 

It is like heady perfume, promising the presence of the man who destroyed her life.

He is dead. She tells herself this, over and over - Sephiroth is dead. It was in the papers. The entire city of Midgar was buzzing with the scandal of it for months. Then, like with Nibelheim, like with her father - the news grew old. Gossip changed. People moved on.

Not her. She waits in tense anticipation for the moment he will come crawling from that hole in the ground, to visit her with that awful smile and that glint of insanity lighting his eyes. 

More than anything, she would like to dream of how things were before. She would like to be visited by the ghosts of those she loved. These things happen to the grieving - so she’s heard. 

But she gets no visits from the ones she loves. 

All she gets is smoke and shadows, and him.

*


	2. Chapter 2

Feb. 17 | Day 2. **First meeting**

*****

They say the dead live on in the hearts of those who love them. Perhaps the same is true for those that are despised. 

She does not want to be keeping him alive. But she does not know how to bury him, either. 

When her Nibelheim friends speak of ghosts, it is with a sort of unspoken agreement that they speak of what they long for rather than real, tangible experiences. They’re using poetic license. They speak with nostalgic smiles pulling at their mouths, their eyes glazed with memories of happier days.

Tifa knows that her own experiences are not wishful thinking. Because she never wished for him to haunt her. 

And yet he does.

It started as a case of mistaken identity. Midgar folk have a strange fashion sense, especially downworld. The first times she brushed shoulders with people who wore their hair long and dyed white, she had to run and hide, catch her breath, stare desperately to catch a glimpse of their faces. Persuade herself that they were not him. 

Then, once, a man with silver hair turned around, and the face he wore did not belong to a stranger.

She voiced it to her Nibel friends. They nodded and said they understood, but she knew they were only being sympathetic. They always spoke in tongues, scattering the dust of dreams and poetry over their real experiences. They didn’t hear the raw, terrifying truth of what she was saying.

She used no poetic license when she spoke of him. She knows what she saw. She knows what she continues to see. 

He is in Midgar with her. Somehow. Impossibly. He is there, standing in the bustling crowds, in the reflection of the Midgar night train windows. He is there, bending over bouquets in Upperworld flower shops, walking in the streetlights of rainy winter nights. 

She knows ghosts don’t exist. People disperse into the Lifestream and simply cease. Believing in ghosts is wishful thinking. So what is it that she sees? In a world of magic and monsters, she has to wonder if there is some phenomenon that escaped the science books, some property of the Lifestream that the ShinRa science department hasn’t yet divulged to the public. Or maybe it's all in her head.  


It is always terrifying. Only, familiarity makes her expect it now. The thump of her heart is a familiar thrill. The turn of her body, as one does when faced by a monster. Don’t run, Zangan used to say. Run and they will only take chase. 

*

He does not look at her, at first. She pretends it is because he hasn’t noticed her. 

She tries to live as her Nibelheim friends suggest. Throw yourself into work. Find company for your lonely nights. She meets a man who comes from Correl, who is all bulk and intimidation, but she recognises something in him that has her drift closer. 

He is like her in many ways. They commiserate. It is hard to tell, with those who’ve known loss as deep as yours, what is commiseration and what is true feeling. When he looms over her one night, after an interminable shift at the Seventh Heaven, she wonders if she feels attraction or the childish urge to build a bridge together over that unbridgeable hole. 

She is in the alleyway at the back of the Seventh Heaven, leaning against the dirty redbrick wall when he kisses her for the first time. She clings to him, and something inside her loosens pleasantly, the tension she always holds finally easing up.

Until she smells smoke. 

She opens her eyes and looks over Barret’s shoulder. 

There is a deep black shadow further down the alleyway. When it moves, long white hair unfurls. A face emerges, devastatingly familiar. 

He is there. 

And he’s looking at her. 

She tightens her grip on Barret’s jacket. She stares back at the spectre’s face. Barret takes her tightened grip as an invitation, and stretches her mouth with his tongue, holding her closer. 

She doesn’t know how to react. The spectre goes on watching her, deathly still, green eyes glowing in the dark. It must be a hallucination - that’s the only reasonable answer. If Barret turns around, she knows that he won’t see anything. 

Don’t run, Zangan used to say. 

She kisses Barret back hard. Holds him as close as she dares.

The spectre watches her. Then, slowly, his lips curl into a crooked smile. 

She squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them again, he’s gone. 

*


	3. Chapter 3

Feb. 18 | Day 3. **Slice of Us  
**

*

Barret is in bed with her. It’s taken some time to trust him enough, to accept that she can welcome good things into her life. To try and act as though this life were not some strange, twisted off-shoot of the life she was supposed to live.

She is straddling him. She hasn’t taken off her top and he doesn’t try to remove it for her. He understood, the first time she jerked away from his seeking hands. He’s accepted that she only appreciates his touch as long as there is a layer of cotton between them. 

This is something she’s discovered quite recently. There are these boundaries that pull her outside of herself as soon as they are breached. Before him, she hadn’t explored the tender places where her body stored its own memories.

When they find places like that, they go around them, like walking quietly around sacred grounds. This is something she loves about him. He accepts these things quietly, without question, and goes looking for those parts of her that bloom into his hands. 

He holds her tight against his chest as he sighs against her neck. She loves to hear him climax. He groans into her long hair, snatching it up between his fingers. Once he’s finished she falls beside him onto the bed, gazing at his expression as he comes down slowly. He smiles back at her, drowsy with satisfaction. When his strong arms close around her, she feels safer than she has done in a long time.

She doesn’t know when she fell asleep. If she fell asleep at all. She only knows that the night has deepened, and that something is wrong. 

Barret is beside her, his broad back turned to her. She lays there and realises after a moment that she can’t move.

There is a tell-tale scent of smoke in the air. 

It’s a nightmare, she tells herself. Sleep paralysis. It’s not the first time it’s happened to her. Sometimes she hears fire raging, and the screams of those who died that night on Mount Nibel. 

This time there are no such sounds. But the air is thick with smoke and shadows.

She knows he’s here. 

A voice echoes in her head. Whether it comes from without or within, she can’t tell. The deep timbre of it reverberates inside her, stealing away her breath. 

_ Nibelheim girl.  _

Her mouth opens as she struggles to breathe. The smoke is so thick. She can feel a ghostly heat around her, the glow of a fire that only exists inside her head.

_ Why,  _ she wants to say,  _ why are you haunting me? Why are you here? _

_ I am not really here,  _ says the voice.  _ And neither are you.  _

She grits her teeth. Somehow she can feel him coming closer, as though he were looming over her. She wants to pull the covers over herself so badly, but she can’t move. 

The shadows drape over her hips. She is lying on her back, pinned there by the weight of it. Silk drifts over her naked belly, the fall of his silver hair dragging up her body as the shape of him surrounds her. 

His face emerges from the darkness, all sharp lines and glowing eyes. 

_ You are still in the heart of that fire, aren’t you, Tifa?  _

It is like all dialogue in dreams, incoherent and yet staggeringly true. She helplessly stares into the face of her nightmare as he smiles down at her. 

His mouth form the words, but she hears them deep inside her head: 

_ I am there, too. _

Cold leather moves against her stomach. His gloved hand sinks beneath her tank top. She stares into those green eyes, unable to breathe, as he crosses that line.

The tank top stretches, his wrist dragging it up. His gloved fingers find the jagged edges of her scar. Something shivers through her, recognition perhaps, of the man who placed it there. 

_ You’re dead,  _ Tifa thinks desperately, _ you aren’t real, you’re dead, you’re dead.  _

His fingers trace the sensitive line of the scar, right up between her breasts. The tank top slides further up as he does so. 

_ The Lifestream holds many secrets,  _ he murmurs.  _ It allows some creatures, some snapshots of life, to endure. Some are kept alive simply by virtue of being... vividly remembered. _

_ No,  _ Tifa thinks savagely.  _ If that were true then all my townspeople would still be alive. _

His deep laugh twists through her insides. His fingertips have reached her cleavage, finding the tip of her scar at last.

_ You were a lonely child, weren’t you?  _ he murmurs.  _ I saw it. The Lifestream holds memories like fossils in amber. You did not care for your townspeople, not truly. You were wrapped up in yourself, as most children are. You wanted to see more of the world, to find yourself out there. Your grief is selfish - you grieve for yourself, you pity the orphan girl you have become. If you truly grieved for your townspeople, then you would see their ghosts as your friends do. You would wrench them back from the dead, as you have me.  _

Hot tears trickle down the sides of Tifa’s face.  _ I hate you so much.  _ She screams it in her mind.

_ Yes,  _ he purrs.  _ And that is why I endure. When you came to me that night - that bloodlust consumed you like nothing else ever had, didn’t it? It seared right through you, stronger than any love you might’ve felt. Stronger than any belonging you might’ve had towards your hometown. It is the red string that binds us both to that moment in time. We belong there, both of us, in the mire of that bloodlust. In the heat of the fire. That is why we are still there, always.  _

_ No,  _ Tifa thinks, harder than ever.  _ Shut up. I don’t want to think about any of this. I want you gone. Out of my head. Out of my goddamn life. _

_ Are you quite sure of that?  _ he asks, his mouth a whisper away from hers.  _ It is in your hands. If you truly want me gone… then simply let me go.  _

She realises then, that some part of his twisted speech was right. That the fire that fills her is hatred, deep and pure and blazing. It pools within her at the touch of his hand, drowning her in an intensity of feeling that nothing has ever kindled in her before. Like that day in Nibelheim, it fills everything - the night sky, the room around her, the gaping hole in the ground that can be filled by nothing else.

His mouth closes over hers, and she knows he can feel the heat of it on his tongue. 

She bites down until she can taste blood.

*

When Barret wakes her at last, she is drenched in sweat, her eyes wild. She holds onto him, the comforting solidity of his body, the cool contact of his skin. 

He lets her cling to him until the anxiety passes. Then, he sits up and brushes the hair from her face. “You alright, Tifa?” 

He’s wearing a knowing look. She knows he has nightmares of his own. 

“Yeah,” she says as she pushes herself up beside him. She manages to smile. “Just a bad dream. It’s fine.”

He strokes her face. “Toast?”

She nuzzles his palm with a frown. “Sounds good.” 

*


	4. Chapter 4

Feb. 19 | Day 4.  **Words**

*****

Is she selfish? Is that why the others can boast of their many experiences, their snatched conversations with the dead, their tender embraces with ghosts? Because ghosts only show up if you grieve with the appropriate depths of feeling?

The words from the nightmare follow her everywhere she goes. Perhaps she does fit the image he has of her. A lonely selfish child, who grew into a lonely selfish woman. Perhaps she didn’t love her family enough. Perhaps she didn’t take advantage of what she had, while she had it. Perhaps her ghosts don’t find her deserving of a visit.

She should’ve lived more. Loved more. She had so little time with them, and that time was spent mooning over such useless,  _ useless  _ things. 

Selfish. He’s right. She’s a cold, lonely, selfish woman.

Suddenly the bloodlust is turned inwards rather than outwards. She is bursting with the need to harm, bleed, hurt. 

She asks Barret one night to grip her harder, wrap a hand around her throat, bruise her skin. He tries, bless him, but even he can only give so much until they reach his own boundaries. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, Tifa,” he rumbles. He sounds distraught. He doesn’t deserve to be put through this, for her own ludicrous needs. He cradles her against him as she pants, trembling, bruises already blooming over her skin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers against him, blinking the heat from her eyes. She wishes this could be enough. Him. Her friends. The community she’s painstakingly built around herself.

But it isn’t. 

It just isn’t. 

*

She sees him again one night, out in the train graveyard. She goes there regularly to train, ploughing through the motions of Zangan’s teachings. She doesn’t want any of it to go to waste. 

There is something cathartic about vaulting and drop-kicking through the evening. She rips the delicate blue fins of Deenglow dragons to shreds; shatters the mechanical joints of ShinRa’s old Sweeper units that are still clattering around. A sheen of sweat soon covers her body as she leaves a trail of broken robotics and an apothecary’s dream of monstrous body parts behind her.

With much clanging and whirring of faulty alarm systems, she gets surrounded by Sweepers. She feels for the materia in her bracer, sets her chin, glares at her assailants. 

They all wear the ShinRa logo, brown with rust. 

She holds out her hands. Fire bursts out of her in a fiery bloom. She roars at them as she directs it all around herself.

She could’ve used Lightning. But the fire hits the oil in their systems and sets off a series of bright explosions. 

She pants, darkly gleeful, as fire surrounds her. The smell of smoke reaches her, and she breathes out slowly, trying to bear it. 

She knows he’s watching.

“Hiding in the shadows again?” she calls recklessly.

“I’m enjoying the view,” comes the sly response. 

He comes out of the darkness of one of the broken down trains. As always, the moonlight fall of his hair has her breath catch in her throat. She shakes away the feeling of awe that the mere sight of him always provokes. 

He doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserve the fear that thrums through her veins. 

She sets her jaw as he walks towards her at a leisurely pace. 

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she throws out at him. “You think we’re similar somehow. But you’re wrong.”

A small smirk lingers on his mouth. “Oh?”

“You’re the demon of Wutai. You’ve killed plenty before. I think you enjoy it.” 

He’s right in front of her now. He says nothing in response, only observes her with calm curiosity. Then he opens his hand to the scattered mechanics and monsters around them. 

“And you don’t?”

She seethes: “Pest control isn’t the same as burning down a village full of civilians. You were a decorated soldier! You  _ know _ that difference.”

His eyes gleam in the darkness. “I’m not sure there is one,” he purrs. “One cannot kill if one sees the adversary as a brother, a person worthy of dignity. They train you to see monsters until it is all you see.”

“Bullshit,” she snaps. “Don’t deflect the blame. You ShinRa men enjoy killing people, specifically, because there’s more power to it. You massacred my hometown because you wanted to revel in the power you had over us.”

“Perhaps,” he says, uncovering his teeth with his smile. “And you understand this intimately well, because you feel it too, don’t you? You chase that power just as readily as I do. You tasted it once. It’s only natural to want more.” 

“You’re  _ wrong! _ ” Tifa shouts. “I’ve never had power like that! But you - you always had it, that control over people’s lives, thanks to ShinRa, your Soldier enhancements, your body. I was just a girl, Sephiroth. A sixteen year old girl. I wanted to kill you because you took what little I had until I had nothing. No control. No power.  _ Nothing. _ ”

She’s shaking as the words pour out of her . He watches her, his face smooth and impassible. In that deep part of her that is always burning, she wants to hit him, break his skin, watch blood run down his body.

“I still have nothing,” she gasps. “Thanks to you.”

He closes the distance between them. When he keeps walking, she instinctively backs away until her spine hits the rusty wall of a train. 

He looms over her, wrapped in darkness and moonlight. Then he smiles that crooked smile.

“You have your anger,” he murmurs. “You have fire raging inside you."

When his hand drifts up the bare skin of her arm, she closes her eyes, wondering at how real that sensation feels.

"You have me."

Despairingly, she wants to laugh. His fingertips play along her neck, move up past her hairline. 

“You don’t get it, do you?” she sighs. “I don’t want you. I’m tired of hating you. The fire, bloodlust, however you called it - I don’t want it.” 

He bunches her hair in his fist, and the thrill of pain spears through her, igniting her core. 

“I just want a normal life,” she gasps.

“You burn because it is your true nature,” he says. He leans in, his mouth moving against the shell of her ear: “You can try to fight it if you want. I did, for many years. But you will surrender to it, as you have before. It is the purest state of being.”

“I only burn because I loved my home,” Tifa whispers, her voice hoarse. “You burn because you’re a fucking animal. I don’t think you ever loved anyone or anything.”

Something ice cold and dangerous flashes through his eyes. 

She staggers a little when he lets go of her hair. In a sweep of shadows, he leaves her there against the train, retreating into the dark. She looks around, massaging the sore spot on her scalp. 

He’s gone. 

*


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Gotta admit I struggled with this chapter. Had to thin down the amount of actual closeness that happens to better fit the overall tone. Hopefully it sticks enough with the rest of the fic!)

Feb. 20 | Day 5. **Closeness**

*****

It’s become quite satisfying to jangle the keys of her new place between her fingers. She strides up the stairs at the back of the Seventh Heaven, unlocks the electrified metal gate, and lets herself in.

It was hard at first to accept that these dingy overpriced rooms were all she could hope for in terms of accomodation here. Going from the mayor’s house in Nibelheim to her first small shack in Sector 4 was a shock. But she got used to it.

Then just last month, the Seventh Heaven managers offered to rent her one of the small studios above the bar. And just the fact of being on the second storey, the added security of it, and the extra space - she feels inordinately pleased to have earned it. 

She’s got a housewarming party to organise. She cleans every available surface, strings up fairy lights, goes out to grab drinks. 

She ignores her pounding heart as she marches through the darkness of the slum junkyards. 

She hasn’t seen him for days. 

She hopes she never sees him again. She hopes that the last time, she insulted him enough to break whatever spell had given him substance.

Part of her knows this isn’t true. She knows he’s out there, still. But she pushes it from her mind. 

Barret comes knocking at the door first. He brings friends with him, a scrappy bunch who seem to know a lot more than they should about skirting Midgarian law. They’re the only ones who are invited. Tifa didn’t want to bring in her Nibelheim folk - she wants this place to belong only to her present life. And her future. 

They drink and talk long into the night. Tifa puts on some music they brought, and they manage to clear enough space on her dirty rug to dance. Barret pulls her against him and she smiles as they fill her new home with laughter.

It’s late when the last of the crew heads out. Barret heads out with them to accompany them downstairs. Tifa picks at the bottles, groggy with drunkenness and the satisfaction of an evening well spent.

_ Tap, tap, tap.  _

There’s someone at the door. It must be Barret, coming back up to spend the night. She calls to invite him in, still reaching in one of her cupboards to shove borrowed beer glasses away. 

The door opens. Soundless. She stumbles over to greet Barret, dazed with alcohol. She’s grinning as she winds her arms around the body that steps over the threshold. 

Barret pushes her against the wall. His mouth is on hers, biting her lower lip. She moans with delight at his forwardness, pressing the length of her body against him. 

There is the smell of smoke on the air. She notes this distantly. More present is the taste of spiced rum on Barret’s lips. She placed it there herself with her sloppy kisses. It always adds something irresistible to the kiss when alcohol is wrapped up in it. Like a tinge of recklessness. 

His hands run along her arms, then down her body, as though exploring the shape of her. She shivers at the contact of his wide, rugged palms. 

It’s strange. He’s not usually so insistent. She’s not one to complain, though.

When his hands drift up again and close around her throat, the alarm grows. Barret doesn’t touch her like that unless she asks him to. 

It’s his body. His face. His dark, smooth skin, marked here and there by scars. She stares at him as he leans his forehead against hers, panting against her mouth. His hands are heavy on her neck, poised to choke her. 

She feels it in her bones as she stares at him. 

It’s not him. 

“I loved, once,” he says, his voice a low growl. “Whether you believe it or not.”

She watches, horror-struck, as the familiar shape of Barret’s body changes before her eyes. She’s too close to him to catch the details - she only knows that he rises around her, growing taller, slimmer. The darkness of his body turns the deep black of ink, while his face, so near to hers, grows lighter. 

She squeezes her eyes shut. She’s drunk. She’s seeing things again.

This is Barret. She clutches his forearms despairingly. It’s Barret. Nobody else.

But the skin under her palms turns cold, and  _ moves _ , separate from the flesh beneath. When she unsticks her hands from it, she realises that the skin turned to leather sleeves, like they just materialised there.

When she opens her eyes, it’s Sephiroth who is pinning her to the wall, looming intimately close. 

“I loved as fiercely as you did,” he murmurs, green eyes glowing eerily at her. He speaks as though picking up their conversation, as though no time has passed between now and that evening in the train graveyard. Tifa can’t breathe as she stares up at him. “Perhaps that is what set us on this path. Perhaps that is what stripped us of humanity in the first place.”

Dazed, she manages to say: “Love isn’t meant to do that.”

“And yet it does.”

When he kisses her again, it has all the sharpness and venom of a snakebite.

She tries to wrench out of it, but the stupor of drunkenness and her own disbelief that this is even happening to her makes it impossible. Like wading through a dream, running in slow motion, hurtling towards a door you never reach - she tries to escape the searing heat of his mouth, the clinging insistence of it. He kisses her as though he could draw out the soul from her body that way. 

She gasps when he breaks it off at last. His lips are shining with spiced rum and her own saliva. She stares at the impossibility of such a concept.

His hands, lithe and leather-clad, travel over her body again. He seeks out the hem of her dress, drawing it up over her hip, feeling for her bare skin. Cold fingers follow the burn marks there. He traces them along the line of her underwear, coming around to the small of her back. 

Her pulse is pounding, making her delirious. His hands are on her, but at the same time, they’re not - like this is happening to her, but not really, because she still doesn’t believe it. 

“It scares you to admit it,” he whispers. “That I could feel the same things you do. That my life contained the same banal domestic worries as yours.” His fingers venture up the length of her back, pressing her against him, her body sinking into the cold black leather of his trench coat. “That we could be similar.”

“I told you,” she growls into the silvery lengths of his hair. “I’m nothing like you.”

“That is what you tell yourself,” he purrs. His fingertips are hungry to find more signs of the tragedy that binds them. They skid around her ribs, along the underside of her breasts, searching for that familiar line that cuts across her heart. “You need to hold me separate from yourself, to convince yourself that you do not condone my actions. But some deep, primal part of you does, doesn’t it?”

She clings to the wall, as she would the fabric of a dream, like she could peel it open and struggle her way out. Dark pleasure blooms unwarranted in her belly as he touches her. 

The heat of the fire is blazing out of control.

He leans closer still. The scent of smoke is so overpowering, and now, mingling with these sensations - it’s like the smoke is his will, wrapping tight around all that she is. 

“You have wanted to burn the world for a long time,” he hisses against her mouth. “I showed you it was possible.”

She hates how true his words always ring.

There is so much to feel. Guilt. Shame. Horror, that this might be real somehow. She doesn’t know which is worse - if this is some hallucination she is painting over Barret, or some terrible shapeshifting  _ thing _ , crawling into her flat, laying its claim on her body and soul, wearing the face of her nightmare. 

Knowledge flares in that deep part of her that is always burning. She knows it’s him. In her bones, like before, she knows it with a terrible immediacy. He is dead, but he is here too, somehow, like a grinning afterimage. Perhaps he was drawn by the smell of burning. 

He is inside her flat, inside her head, inside her heart. Perhaps it’s the drink, perhaps it’s the late hour and all the strange revelations it brings - but she believes it at last, that he is here. Everything is silver silk and the sound of raging flames and wooden walls collapsing as his fingertips find her scar again. It throbs horribly as he traces it with sickening fascination.

She glares at him. Her pulse is pounding just as hard as it did that night, when she leapt at him with his katana in her hands, murder singing in her blood. 

_ The only one I wanted to burn was you,  _ she seethes, out loud or in her mind, she can no longer tell the difference.  _ You, and ShinRa, and all that you stand for _ . _ But you died. You died. And I can’t kill what is already dead.  _

_ Yes you can,  _ comes his voice, slanted with amusement. 

_ How?  _

His smile brushes her swollen lips. 

_ First, you bring it back to life. _

*****


	6. Chapter 6

Feb. 21 | Day 6. **Words +** **Closeness**

*****

She is sitting at a fancy white dinner table. In front of her, an empty plate, several pieces of silver cutlery, three different wine glasses. 

On the other side of the table, a similar arrangement has been made. 

Sephiroth sits facing her. He’s wearing a pressed white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, like he’s fresh from some business meeting. His skin is so clean and smooth. It is strange somehow, to see him without the soot and blood.. 

He is speaking to the waiter, who is presenting a bottle of red vintage to him. They smile at one another cordially, Sephiroth extending his wineglass. The waiter pours a little wine in it. Sephiroth sips and nods his appraisal of the flavour. 

“Mm. Maybe something older. With more substance.”

“I’ll be right back.”

The waiter bustles away. 

Tifa looks around herself. They are in a great hall. Banners and balloons are draped over the ceiling, all of them congregating towards the central point, where a great crystal chandelier hangs. 

A stage with a pulpit crowns the front of the room. There are men in blue suits wandering around it, hands against their earpieces. 

Tifa breathes in sharply when she sees them. Blond hair, crisp white suits. The president and his son are standing by one of the tables. Shinra senior is chortling at something that one of his seated executives just said. 

Heart pounding, she looks down at herself - she remembers wearing that short black dress that Barret liked. It would be wildly inappropriate for a place like this. But she’s wearing an evening gown instead, something purple and shimmering that reaches her ankles. Classy, like the rest of the ladies here. 

She looks back up at Sephiroth. He’s gazing at her with that familiar nonchalance of his. Despite his young, sensible appearance, she can still detect that wild glint in his eye. 

“What is this?” Tifa asks. 

“Your chance,” Sephiroth says. “To see my world and do with it what you will.”

She glances around herself again, somewhat relieved. “A dream, then.” 

The waiter comes back with the wine. Sephiroth tries it again, approves this time. Music and chatter keeps on bubbling over Tifa’s head. It all seems so real. More real than what her day-to-day life has been like lately. She thanks the waiter automatically as he serves her the red, and brings it to her mouth. 

She stills. She remembers stories her mother used to tell her, of strange folk dancing in the glowing caves of Mount Nibel. People disappeared up there and came back with stories of great banquets where they lost all sense of time. Some people swore they could see the dead walking, family members and distant ancestors, wandering the mountains since time immemorial. 

“I’m not sure I should accept any drinks from you,” she says.

Sephiroth grins. “It’s your call.”

The wine smells lovely. But she places it back on the table. Sephiroth seems amused by this, but makes no further comment. 

“How are you doing this?” Tifa asks.

“The dream, you mean?”

“All of it.” Tifa frowns. “How are you so real and alive?”

Sephiroth stares down at one of his clean white hands. He lifts it from the tablecloth, flexes his long lithe fingers. 

“My body died,” he says. “I know that much. When I fell into the Mako, I disintegrated.”

It is far too bizarre to be talking about him dying when he is sitting across from her in pressed clothes, long hair groomed and falling away in sensible lengths rather than the wild blood-stained mane she remembers.

“The Lifestream encourages you to dissipate,” Sephiroth says. “It wants to break you down, so you may be distributed. The only exception to this is the case of the Summons. There is a lot of conjecture surrounding what they are and how they are made. One theory states that it is by the will of the Ancients, and all those who believe in the existence of those creatures, that they remain whole. Like gods, they depend on the belief of the faithful to stay alive. All those pieces of them that dissipate in the Lifestream when they die are coaxed back into one place, so they can be concentrated into materia. So they can be kept whole.”

Tifa frowns as she listens to this. She knows he is going to apply it to himself somehow, but there is one detail that doesn’t stick. 

“Summons depend on materia, as you said,” she replies. “Suppose you were kept whole because of those people who... remember you vividly. The pieces of you get coaxed back together, like you said. But it takes hundreds of years for materia to form in a natural Mako fountain. And someone would have to hold it in their hand and summon you, so you could step back into the world.” 

Sephiroth smiles at her as she engages with his theory. 

“Materia is not the only avenue one can take, if one wishes to store their image,” he says.

“What, then?”

Again, Sephiroth looks at his hand, as though marveling at it. 

“You will meet her,” he says softly. “One day. I am a part of her. She takes from herself and gives me substance to use, like clay, so that I may build myself again.”

Tifa frowns at him in alarm. “What are you talking about? Who is  _ she _ ?”

“You will find out soon enough,” Sephiroth says. “But while she gave me the clay for this body, she could not save my mind from the Lifestream. It is poison to her. That is how I came to understand that I owe my survival to others.” Here, he gives her a glacial smile. “To those who committed every detail of me to their memory.”

Tifa glowers at him. “It was never my  _ will  _ to keep you whole.”

“There you are wrong,” he says softly. “Did you not wish for it earlier? That you might bring back the dead so that you may kill them yourself?”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. Is it really because of her that he is walking Gaia’s earth again? How the hell is she meant to handle this amount of responsibility? 

“Rest assured,” he adds, as though he heard her thoughts. “You are not the only one who wished me whole. You do not need to shoulder that burden.”

“If I’m not the only one, then why visit me?” she asks. “Why come back into my life?”

His eyes glow tantalizingly at her. 

“Is it not enough to know that I am drawn to you?” he says. “That I admire the sheer depths of your feeling?”

“No,” she growls. “I’m not the only one who feels that way, surely. You broke the lives of thousands of people.”

“Those thousands did not stand in the fire of Nibelheim,” Sephiroth says, his gaze intense. “Those thousands did not witness my death. Only you did. You, and the other two, but they are both locked in stasis. They do not remember it. They have not spent years dwelling on every last detail.”

Locked in stasis. Was he talking about… Cloud? And Zack? Distantly, she knows this is true, and vitally important, she knows she should ask him what he means. Are they alive? But as in dreams, the thoughts whirl together without taking hold. She finds herself concentrating on those memories of the Mako reactor instead. She had been slumped against a pod, barely coherent. She sees it again now - the open doorway that led to the heart of the reactor. The shimmering blue light. Cloud, being thrown through the doorway by the strength of Sephiroth’s rage. 

_ Don’t push your luck.  _

She remembers that deep, menacing voice. The fear thrumming through her, as she heard Cloud’s voice rise against Sephiroth’s. The dark shapes of them both as they struggled against one another.

Then, the fatal drop.

Sephiroth is devouring her with his eyes. 

“Yes,” he purrs. “Do you see now?”

She shakes her head. She’s aching to drink from her wineglass.

“The magic by which I was pieced together has its own laws,” Sephiroth says. “You were there at the time of my undoing. I must settle my debt to you, first. I am tethered to you until it is done.”

Tifa lifts her chin. “You can settle it by undoing yourself right back again.”

Sephiroth smirks at her. “I don’t think you want that,” he murmurs. “You would not be satisfied if I ended my own life.”

His words ring achingly true, as always. Something dark and primal throbs between them as she glares at him. 

“No,” she agrees. “I don’t think I would be.”

Around them, the party goes on. Wine pours, laughter crests the endless white noise of civilised chatter. Tifa’s heart is pounding heavily in her chest as she tries to take his words into consideration. 

“How will you do it, then?” she asks. “How will you settle your debt?”

He lifts his hand, gesturing at the ballroom. “I thought this might adequately suit your proclivities.”

She stares at him, uncomprehending. He reaches below the table in his trouser pocket, and then places a small green orb on the table between them. Warily, she reaches across the table for it.

When she picks it up, the potential of it pulls at her senses. It is a piece of mastered materia. 

Fire. 

She gazes at Sephiroth levelly, daring to imagine what this gift entails. She’s never held such a powerful piece of materia before.

She could wreak absolute carnage with it. 

Sephiroth smiles at her.  _ Yes,  _ he purrs, in the confines of her mind.  _ You could indeed.  _

Slowly she gets up from the table. She looks at the people in the room all around her, all these oblivious targets. The blue suits. The white. The jet set with diamonds at their throats. Those bastards who wear the pin of the Mako Fund, the infamous resource pool from which ShinRa draws its money to build their reactors. 

She sees the chain of command before her, the chronology of it. Those men ordered that the reactor be set up on Mount Nibel. Those ones incited the folk of Nibelheim to pay extra taxes, enticed them to leave their ancestral trades and work at the reactor. Convinced them to work longer hours for less and less returns. Those ones ordered the hush-up of the Mako leaks, the poisonings that killed her mother, the tainted water supply. They hushed up the fire itself, too. Nobody knows it happened, here in Midgar. Nobody ever believes her when she tries to bring it up. 

And those ones, with the military badges on their chests. They created Sephiroth. 

All of them gathered in one room. It is like a feast, glittering with badges and name cards, all those people she has fantasized about ripping apart for so long. 

She taps into the materia. Bristles as magic flows through her effortlessly. 

Her arms drift out in front of her. Magic simmers into her waiting palms. She feels it shivering on her skin. 

The ecstasy of it pricks her deliciously. Nothing can compare to this sheer, unadulterated power.

She has waited so long for this. 

Fire spills out of her. It runs along the ground like so many hell hounds, pouncing through the tables, devouring the decorated ceiling. Richly-clad people stumble around, roaring their fear and surprise, grabbing one another. She stands in the chaos, her lips retracted, a starved wolf set loose in a sheep-gorged pasture. 

Fire burns it all. It cloaks their bodies like orange silk. It draws all the light out of them until all that is left is black, charred ash. She finds this fitting, that once their rich veneer is peeled away, all that would be left is ugly black ooze. 

It drains her. The magic, and the sight of so much death. She feasts on it at first, because it’s a dream, it’s allowed, it does not have consequences. 

Then she asks herself - is it, truly? Sephiroth could’ve deceived her. Is she tearing apart a real ballroom, a real crowd of people? 

She asks herself then - would she stop? 

Would she stop if they were real? 

The answer terrifies her. She brings her hands to her face, finds wet lines running down her cheeks. She can’t breathe for the smoke that chokes the air.

Sephiroth stands in front of her. The strangely tender look on his face is enhanced by the glow of the flames.

He reaches for her face, cups it in his hands.

He must know that this fire is meant for him, too. It doesn’t seem to bother him.

He smiles as he rubs the tears from her cheeks. And she hears his voice in her head, as the walls crumble around them, and the ceiling breaks inwards, plunging them all into darkness.

_ Beautiful. _

*****


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the long-windedness of this chapter but I literally cannot spend more time on it because I have other writing to be getting on with :') Hopefully it is enjoyable to read & makes sense! Thanks for reading and sticking with me through this week guys <3

Feb. 22 | Day 7. **Forgiveness**

*****

Dreams are not enough to settle his debt. 

Tifa has no idea how it might ever be settled. She wants it to be settled, of course she does - she has no desire to be _tethered_ like this to the man who destroyed her life.

No, that’s not right. It is him that is tethered to her. 

On the surface, she wants it to be done. She wants him gone. She’s ready to tell him whatever he wants to hear, bless him with whatever absolution he needs to sever this tie that binds them. 

But deeper in, where fire burns and dark creatures lurk, she wants him close. She wants to know he is there, to hurt, to insult, to hold in her hands like all those lives he once held in his. It is such a rare thing, to have power over him in that way. 

*

She thinks long and hard about what would happen, if she gave him absolution. He would stop haunting her every step, and give her some relief. She wants that. She wants to stop thinking about him. 

But he would still roam the world, and break more people’s lives. 

When she refuses again and again to accept his gifts as settlement, he grows angrier. He pushes her, with stinging words and horrible fear, to sever the tie. Once he realises that gets him nowhere, he comes with dream-gifts again, full of sparkling opportunities she’s never indulged in before. But however often he invades her thoughts and goads her from the shadows, he is the one who owes her. He cannot be rid of his debt until she says it is settled.

After a while, she wonders why he doesn’t simply kill her. And the reply comes easily as anything. 

He can’t. 

While that debt remains between them, he can’t kill her. He can’t rid himself of those who brought him back to life. It is why he is so adamant to obtain her forgiveness. 

His compliments, his supposed admiration of her - it’s all empty falsities. The truth is, he does not want to be tied to a girl whose life he robbed. He detests that she might hold him accountable for it. He tries to flatter her into admitting that somehow, somehow, there was some poetry to take from the incident, there was some deeper meaning to it all, that he is somehow less culpable for it. But it’s all bullshit.

Once she forgives him, she gives him all the freedom to push her from his mind once and for all, and do as he pleases with no further thought for those he hurts. 

No. She’ll make him look at her for as long as she dares. For as long as he deserves.

And then she will be the one to end him.

Cloud took something from her, that night in the reactor. He robbed her of her kill. And like a gangled Nibel wolf with her jaws clamped around her prey, she won’t let go easy. 

She won’t waste this second chance.

*

She finds Cloud one day, on the steps of the train station. He remembers nothing, at first. His mind is all twisted up by what he’s suffered. She leaves it alone, lets his memories surface by themselves. She would not want to inflict memories like that on anyone. Part of her hopes he will never remember it as vividly as she does. 

Perhaps it is that old dream that pushes her to do it. The idea that it’s possible to tear ShinRa apart. She’s tasted those flames - she wants to pull them out into the real world. She helps Barret to form Avalanche anew, when the old members surface with gear and intelligence and a need for more manpower. Sometimes she wonders if it is Sephiroth who pushes these people into her life, as a way of helping her fulfill her dreams. There’s no way of knowing - he’s always so fucking cryptic. 

Sometimes she sees him, as she runs through the moonlit streets of the Upperworld on one of their missions. Sometimes he helps - he tears ShinRa troops to the ground, and drives them all mad with the nightmarish sight of him while she escapes. 

Other times, he makes it difficult.

She isn’t the only one he torments. Even though Cloud remembers nothing, Sephiroth can flare those memories he’s locked away. Over and over, Sephiroth appears to him, speaks in his mind like he does Tifa’s. She wonders if he does this to hurt her, as well as Cloud.

Tifa holds Cloud’s sweaty hands through the nightmares, and curses her own selfishness. If she let him go then perhaps he would leave Cloud alone. 

But she has no such guarantees. 

*

She dreams again one night. She dozed off in the containment cell she shares with Aeris in the ShinRa HQ. When she opens her eyes, he is standing there in the open doorway. 

She wanders out into the dim grey corridor. Follows the spectral shape of him through the HQ. At last they come to a great oval office, where President Shinra is sitting. 

Sephiroth turns to her with that devil’s smile. His hands are open between them. Slowly, the shape of the Masamune shimmers into being. 

She stares at the hilt. 

“He isn’t mine to kill,” Tifa hears herself say. “He owes a debt to the whole damn world.”

“As do I,” he says. “And yet someone must cancel it out.” 

She stares into his wild, glowing eyes. It is a dream. No consequences, like before.

Her hands close around the cool leather-bound handle of the Masamune. She has only gripped this sword once before, but her hands remember the satisfying weight of it, the bloody potential heavy in her grip.

She strides to the President and runs him through like a stuck pig. 

When she wakes up, an alarm is blaring. The cell doors are all open. Aeris, looking worried, pulls her off the bed so they can join the others.

There is a trail of blood on the floor. 

She has a horrible sinking feeling that is quickly overcome by a rush of feral excitement. That this time it was no dream at all.

And she’s right.

*

 _ShinRa is finished now,_ he whispers to her, during the long nights they spend in inns on the other side of the world. _You must let me go._

She clings to his dark leather, the taste of blood in her mouth. 

_The debt isn’t settled,_ she says. _Not yet. Not yet._

*

Cloud remembers at last. And he is sick with it.

She battles with him so that they may find his true self again. They sink into the Lifestream together, and she knows how hard it is, to disentangle from the pain, to accept this intolerable past. To acknowledge that these tragedies will cling to them forever. 

He emerges at last. He is broken by it. She helps him to fight away the Mako poisoning, because she cannot lose him now. If he succumbs to the heaviness of their past then she feels that she will, too. 

He survives. They talk, long into the night, about their respective memories. He remembers killing Sephiroth, and Tifa is ashamed of how she asks for details, how she relishes the idea of it. 

The unforgiving steel of the Buster sword, piercing through that body. Dragging away his life. 

Cloud downs an umpteenth shot of rum and shakes his head at her. 

“Just thinking about it,” he says, “thinking about having to do it again - I don’t know if I can manage it. I’m so tired, Tifa.”

“I know,” Tifa says, squeezing his hands. “But this time you’re not alone. You have all of us.”

He smiles at her, in that reluctant way of his, as though a single smile takes him all the energy in the world. 

She carefully folds away the words she wants to say. _The responsibility isn’t yours. It’s mine. He’s mine. And this time it’s my turn to stab him through the heart._

*

They do it at last. They tear apart the aberrations that Sephiroth and Jenova wrought on the world. Tifa thinks it is over then, when she collides with him at last, rending him limb from limb. 

It does not satisfy her as she thought it would.

One reason is that ancient magic, forbidding Sephiroth from actually striking back at them as hard as he could. She and Cloud are invulnerable to him, so it is an empty victory. 

Even after he attained godhood, Sephiroth could not rise above the laws that the Lifestream caged him in. He still could not kill the ones who gave him life. The ones who hold him accountable for all he has done.

He struggles against that truth till the bitter end. 

And then, incredibly, when he is mangled at the bottom of that crater, at the edge of death… he accepts it.

He gives her a final dream. In the darkness of her mind, Sephiroth appears to her, bare and repentant. He opens his human arms, and invites his own reaper to deal the final blow. 

Tifa sinks the Masamune into him, at long last. Watches the blood run down his body. Watches, as he disintegrates into wandering will-o-wisps.

It is not enough. 

The debt remains unsettled, when she wakes with her face wet with tears. She knows, devastatingly, through the post-meteor celebrations and city-wide parties, that she will eventually revive him, whether she wants to or not.

* 

Tifa wonders how many times a man must brought back to life and killed before one is capable of forgiving him. It was not enough for her the first time around. 

It was not enough for Cloud, either. 

When he appears in Edge, all those years later, she holds back. She has a feeling that killing him a second time will only bring more empty disappointment. Cloud, on the other hand, is brimming with rage. He needs it. Sephiroth allows him to fly into the air, to deliver him that fatal blow a third time. 

Three times. That was what Cloud needed, to forgive him at last. To tuck his nightmares away and allow himself to move on. 

That debt is lifted. It shows on Cloud’s face. He smiles so much more easily now. Tifa is happy for him, that he might’ve shrugged off such a weight at last. 

Her, on the other hand… she’s been holding on for so long that she doesn’t know how to let go the weight she carries, clamped between her teeth.

She’s not sure she ever knew.

*

 _What will it take, Tifa?_ Sephiroth whispers to her in the dead of night. _Gaia thrives. The world is changing. You are happy. Why do you want me here?_

There is always some tiny alien growth, clinging to a deep dank cave. Always some piece of clay for Sephiroth to form himself with. It’s impossible to wipe out Jenova completely when she can subsist as a cluster of cells. He will always have the potential of returning with that primordial clay, as long as those who remember him will him from the Lifestream. 

After she brings him back again a fourth time, she doesn’t know what he will do if she manages somehow to let him go. If he will live the kind of simple life he was denied. If he will grapple at godhood again. Or if he will simply dissipate. He seems tired.

 _Is it peace that you want?_ she asks him. 

_My memories are growing_ _waterlogged with time_ , he says. _They are too heavy_. _I wish for another life. Another self. I wish for something uncomplicated._

_I do, too,_ she whispers. _I wished for an uncomplicated life. But you made that impossible. And I still don’t know how to forgive you._

 _You can ask anything of me,_ Sephiroth says. _Anything. I will grant it for you._

She stares up at the ceiling. She has children now, with Barret. She loves them more than the whole world, but they bring back details from her past that she wasn’t ready to deal with. She finds herself telling them the stories her mother used to tell her. She picks them up and carries them on her shoulders, as her father used to do for her. Barret is like her, he has no family to turn to when they need help - they both turn to their friends, and try to find family there. 

It isn’t as it should be. They both feel this, how slanted their lives are. But they make the most of what they have.

She threads her fingers through the cold leather of Sephiroth’s gloved hands, and leans her forehead against his. 

_Give me a dream of my childhood._

*

She’s well into her fifties when she meets the only other person who is clinging to Sephiroth as hard as she is. 

He has a long mane of red hair, and blue eyes tinged by Mako. An ex-Soldier. He’s been in hiding for a long time, imposing solitude on himself. He reminds her of Vincent, in a way - his demons are old and dead, and he’s been trying to find a way to move on from them. 

One of those demons is still roaming. When she mentions this to him, he goes very still. He never heard of this theory, that people might drag someone from the Lifestream like that.

Sephiroth has not visited him once. 

She doesn’t understand this. Surely if Sephiroth has a debt towards him, he would’ve tried to wriggle out of it, as he has with her. 

This man - Genesis, he calls himself - this man knew Sephiroth before the crisis. Before he went insane. Back when he was still somewhat human. 

There is something there. Tifa can feel it. She invites Genesis into their lives, so that he can relieve himself of old memories with a crowd who understands the weight of them.

He’s difficult, but then again, they’re all somewhat wonky and unlivable because of their experiences. They know how to look past initial stubbornness and words spoken in anger. 

Tifa grows fond of him, with his eccentric antics and his obsession with the finer arts. He has a way of painting over his pain with flamboyance. He can be a lot of fun, but it’s the moments of naked honesty that tie him closer to them all. 

He is there with them, in Edge, in Kalm, in all the places they choose to live as a close-knit friend group who depend on one another. 

And yet Sephiroth never shows himself to him. 

She wonders then if she should interfere. She wouldn’t inflict her ghosts on anyone - but like Cloud, she has a feeling that Genesis isn’t quite done with the man in the black cape. That something remains unsaid, that old memories lie cold and heavy between them, waiting to be picked up. 

_I loved, once,_ Sephiroth told her, many years ago.

She decides to act.

* 

Sephiroth is in her living room, waiting. He is still young. She doesn’t know what else he might look like - it is her memory of him, and Genesis’s, that give him the smooth skin, the deceptive youth.

She’s out in the corridor with Genesis. He can’t go in. He knows what she brought in there, and he isn’t ready to face it. 

“You’ll never be ready,” Tifa tells him. “You have to get it over with.”

He breathes out slowly. 

She places a hand on his shoulder in encouragement. He turns so that he might open the door. He lays his hand on the doorhandle and stays there for several long seconds. Then he turns it, and lets the door swing inward. 

They see each other at last. 

Tifa watches Sephiroth’s expression with rapt curiosity. She’s never seen him so discountenanced before. His mouth parts, his body as still as stone. Genesis is the same, held there in the doorway by some dreadful static. He holds his breath, and then lets it out in a sigh, and another one, as though he’s forgotten how to draw air in his lungs.

He steps through the threshold at last. He drags himself across the space that separates them. When he reaches Sephiroth, he cups the man’s face in his hands, like he has to convince himself that he’s really there. 

Tifa closes the door and leaves them to their privacy. 

*

Genesis keeps that part of his past to himself. He never reveals what happened between them. Nor does he reveal what happens now, when he visits their mutual ghost.

Tifa only knows that there is a lot he needs to unpack. It takes him several years before he’s ready to let go at last. 

He meets several people in the meantime. For him, it’s a question of finding someone who will cure him of his loneliness. It takes several tries before someone sticks. 

Tifa wonders why he does not strike up a simple life with their ghost. This could be a second chance for them both. She can’t ask Genesis directly - he’s too private about those things. 

She asks Sephiroth one day. He is private, too. But in this strange relationship of theirs where he owes her his life, he relents a few crumbs, just to get her to leave it alone.

 _He is like you,_ he tells her. _And like Cloud. He has not forgiven me. He can’t. He just wants to close the door on that chapter of his life, and move on._

She wonders, as she always does, how her friends can achieve that. To her, forgiveness and moving on are interdependent. She can’t seem to reach one without the other.

*

It is when her children have kids of their own, and her hair has grown long and grey, that she understands at last. 

Some things, you take to your grave. 

She lies in her bed, during those last days. Her family and friends mill around her house, visiting her, reminiscing with her. They are happy, bittersweet days. She has so many good memories now to occupy her mind. 

But he is there. Under it all. He has always been there, and he always will be, till the very last day. 

He sits in her room during that final day. Young, still, though he wears the truth of his years in those glowing green eyes. He seems like death himself, waiting to carry her away. 

She smiles at him. Welcomes him beside her with relish. These are the last few hours that she will have to be confronted by him. Soon, she will be able to let go at last. 

“You understand, don’t you?” she says softly. “Why your schemes failed. Why you are still here.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Godhood isn’t about power,” she says for him. “Godhood is about existing in the minds of many, as a source of strength, or as a cautionary tale. Godhood is about debt, to those who keep you alive with sacrifice and prayer.”

He looks thinned by all of his unwanted time. Still, he smiles back at her. “You prayed for me to return, again and again. That I might never find peace until you did.”

“Yes.”

“It is a cruel prayer.”

“You’re the one who made me cruel.”

This is the last day. He knows it too. There is softness in his face as deep understanding passes between them. He relishes the thought of true closure as much as she. 

She opens wrinkled hands. He takes off his gloves and places his hands in hers. 

The end comes in a gasp of swirling green and vivid white light. She is with him, clutching him, both of them falling back into the lifeblood of Gaia. She holds onto him for those last few seconds. It is ecstasy, this finality. To know it is all coming to an end. 

She can let go of him at last. 

His fingers slip from hers, and he is gone. 

She sighs as the Lifestream pulls at the fabric of her memories, her body, her selfhood. It is all light as feathers, scattering in a gust of wind. She will begin again. In a new body. In a new life. 

With the last drop of her consciousness, she smiles, and lets herself drift away in the current. 

*


End file.
